It was an oppressively hot August day. Except for the occasional limp attempt at conversation, no one said a word, as if the heat of our breath might raise the room temperature even higher. We had already been sitting in the overdecorated living room for more than a half-hour; the clutter of knicknacks on every available surface began to seem calculated to make the guest feel claustrophobic and rob the room of oxygen.
I sat slumped on the couch, shifting around irritably, unable to find a position to avoid soaking my clothes in sweat. Jon-Erik Hexum's publicist, Guy Thomas, looked pensive; he nervously tapped his white-loafered foot on the floor. Looking fresh and coolly unperturbed in short cutoffs, tennis shoes, and a light T-shirt, Jon-Erik stood in front of a piano in the corner and played a vague, improvised tune.
Guy and I occasionally looked at our wrist watches and dumbly announced the time, wondering out loud where Hexum's "Cover-Up" co-star Jennifer O'Neill might be, since it was her living room we were sitting in. Twice a uniformed maid appeared, once to announce that hot coffee was available and another time to say that O'Neill had just called to explain that she was stuck in a traffic jam on the Pacific Coast Highway.
I did not much feel like being there anyway, given that I wouldn't actually conduct an interview with the two co-stars. Instead, this would be a "celebrity dialogue"---I was only to monitor the conversation and make sure the cassette was flipped over when the tape ran out.
I must admit that I didn't anticipate their discussion to be a stimulating one. It has been my experience that "hunks" like Jon-Erik are usually capable of two kinds of talk: either monosyllabic statements delivered with laid-back boredom or monosyllabic statements dished up with obligatory flirtatiousness---the latter of which usually makes me suspect that at any moment the actor will offer up a flexed bicep and suggest that I give it a squeeze. Jon-Erik had said little more than "hello" since my arrival at O'Neill's Beverly Hills home, so I had no cause to think him any different. At least, I figured, he was not wearing a body shirt unbuttoned down to his navel.
As the minutes ticked by, I began to glare at Thomas out of the corner of my eye, letting him know that if the weather had not been so enervating I would have departed and left him to babysit the tape recorder.
Just as my mood changed from impatient to tense, Jon-Erik began to wander around the room from end table to mantle to coffee table. With each stop he would gesture toward an object--a set of china pigs, some long-necked papier-maché dogs, a gargantuan glass horsehead---as if to underscore its ridiculousness. At one point he pretended he was in a department store purchasing these animal artifacts. "Can you imagine going to buy one of these things?" he said, turning to me. "'Excuse me, sir,'" Hexum intoned. "'I'd like one glass horsehead, please. Oh, and while you're at it, can you throw in a few of those china piggies?'"
Hexum's clowning was clearly devised to deflect my growing anger. Later, when O'Neill finally arrived, he would use this same good-natured wit to sidestep his co-star's puzzling attempts to belittle him, displaying a quiet dignity in his refusal to let O'Neill's vitriol derail him. Before her arrival, though, I had already realized that I had been mistaken about Hexum. "If she doesn't come soon, we're going to have to go through the medicine cabinet," I joked. "Nope," replied Jon-Erik, flopping down on the couch. "I already did that..."
The star of a daytime soap opera once described to me the most peculiar fan letter he had ever received. The viewer first assured him that she was not like all his other fans and could certainly distinguish between reality and the world fabricated for television. With that business out of the way, she had a few questions for him: Did he enjoy playing his character? Would he mind sending her an autographed picture? And, by the way, did his wife mind awfully when she was trying to vacuum the carpet and had to manuever around all those big television cameras?
When the Los Angeles County coroner's office publicly declared Jon-Erik Hexum "brain dead" on October 17, 1984 [sic.--JEH was declared braindead on 10/18/84], I was struck by how, like the misconception of the soap star's fan, we are encouraged by television to take our imaginations only to the halfway mark. Aided by daily news bulletins while Hexum was still in "critical condition," I believed that in spite of the fact that he had fired a blank into his right temple with a .44 caliber magnum, he would still recover---just as he would on television. Indeed, shortly after the announcement of his accident I placed a phone call to his press agent's office to make sure he was still alright, wondering to myself what joke Jon-Erik must have made as he held the gun to his head.
According to one source, it was something like, "Let's let Guido decide," referring to "Cover-Up'"s property man. And just before he pulled the trigger, he said, "Let's see if I've got one for me."
For the record, the incident was more gruesome than reports led us to believe. The "Cover-Up" cast and crew were on a set dressed as a hotel room when the accident occurred. The show's plot had Jon-Erik and O'Neill going undercover in Miami to entrap criminals. Their lure would be O'Neill's photo assistant, played by Mykel T. Williamson, who would pawn himself off as a jewelry smuggler Hexum would pretend to shoot and then dump into the ocean. While Mykel swam back to the hotel, the criminals would come for their cut of the jewels. During the scene in question, Jon-Erik would load blanks into his gun, while Mykel watched.
As described by someone present that afternoon: "The gun was to be sitting on a nightstand next to the bed. Once the scene would begin, Jon-Erik would pick the gun up and work with it...We had shot the scene once or twice. The director didn't get what he wanted and I think they were changing rolls of film or something...Jon-Erik liked to make jokes and keep everybody up...He aimed the gun at the floor and it went off. After he got everyone's attention--and I saw it as an attention getter---he spun the barrel and put it to his head...Then he made a real silly-looking face and then he pulled the trigger...He was sitting on the side of the bed and he fell back onto it...One of the actors rushed over to him, and the prop man grabbed a towel and put it on the side of his head and one of the guest stars put his fingers in his mouth so that he wouldn't bite or swallow his tongue. He was trying to shake the gun out of his hand real eerie-like, but he couldn't control his fingers...The crew worked so fast. They put him on a stretcher and put him in the back of a station wagon and rushed him to the Beverly Hills Medical Center. We didn't have time to wait for the paramedics. There was blood all over the place. After I helped put him on the stretcher it was all over me. There was the initial shock of seeing him fall back and realizing that the gun went off and that it did hurt him. Then the crew moved so fast, and there was really no time. All I remember was the blood...I prayed and called people in my church and asked them to pray for him. I knew he would pull through, because he was so strong. It would just take time...Jon-Erik's death is a greater loss than people can imagine, because I don't think people had gotten a chance to know him...he could do karate, play piano, sing, dance, everything. he could do everything..."
The jokes following Jon-Erik Hexum's accident, and subsequent death, startled me by the alacrity with which they cropped up. Everything surrounding Hexum's tragic death--his good looks, youth, career--seemed tailor-made for macabre punsters. Even the unqualified generosity of Gretha Hexum's decision to donate her son's heart, kidneys, and corneas, appeared to provoke hiliarity as the systematic distribution of this spectacularly handsome man's vital organs conjured up some kind of "hunk" yard sale, particularly after the announcement that the recipient of his heart was thirty-six-year-old Las Vegas resident Michael Washington, owner of Swinging Susy's "escort service."
The local media bustled with stories about gun control and trauma centers. Simultaneously, reporters scurried around as if culling material for a chapter of Hollywood Babylon, the focus of interest being whether or not Hexum was gay and if, as rumored, his "Cover-Up" replacement, Anthony Hamilton, had been his live-in lover.
Has television so desensitized us that its actors no longer represent flesh and blood but are mere flickering images that can be dispensed with at the touch of a dial? Watching Hexum's final episode of "Cover-Up" last week, I was struck by how the nature of the medium and his muscular good looks served doubly to make his human vulnerability difficult to imagine. Perhaps he did not mean to pull the gun's trigger or thought that the blank, once discharged, would only make a loud pop in his ear. Or had Jon-Erik, aided by the fantasy of television, become reckless?
I don't flatter myself by thinking that my afternoon with Hexum means that I knew and understood him, but---if you'lll allow me to eulogize a bit---he seemed an intelligent and thoughtful man whose ambition was to have his talent eventually transcend the marketability of his appearance.
The last time I saw Jon-Erik Hexum was in the sycamore-lined street in front of Jennifer O'Neill's home. Remembering that a friend's birthday was coming up, I asked him to sign something for her. He unfolded a four-color[sic] glossy poster of himself and spread it out on the dusty hood of a parked car. First he took a black felt-tip pen and drew circles around the eyes and connected them with lines to make crude spectacles. Then he thought for a while about what might be an appropriate inscription. "It's a jungle out there," he wrote.
"Take care of yourself. Love and bruises, Jon-Erik Hexum."